kind of letterless country fellow, or bookless fellow whom the Baconians and Mr. Greenwood describe, the contemporary witnesses cited must have detected Will in a day; and the story of the “Concealed Poet” who really, at first, did the additions and changes in the Company’s older manuscript plays, and of the inconceivably impudent pretences of Will of Stratford, would have kept the town merry for a month.  Five or six threadbare scholars would have sat down at a long table in a tavern room, and, after their manner, dashed off a Comedy of Errors on the real and the false playwright.

Baconians never seem to think of the mechanical difficulties in their assumed literary hoax.  If Will, like the old Hermit of Prague who never saw pen and ink, could not even write, the hoax was a physical impossibility.  If he could write, but was a rough bookless man, his condition would be scarcely the more gracious, even if he were able to copy in his scrawl the fine Roman hand of the concealed poet.  I am surprised that the Baconians have never made that point.  Will’s “copy” was almost without blot or erasion, the other actors were wont to boast.  Really the absence of erasions and corrections is too easily explained on the theory that Will was not the author.  Will merely copied the fair copies handed to him by the concealed poet.  The farce was played for some twenty years, and was either undetected or all concerned kept the dread secret—­and all the other companies and rival authors were concerned in exposing the imposture.

The whole story is like the dream of a child.  We therefore expect the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the evidence of Jonson, Heywood, Heminge, and Condell.  Their attempts take the shape of the most extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to Ben’s various estimates of the merits of the plays.  He is constant in his witness to the authorship.  To these efforts of despair we return later, when we hope to justify what is here deliberately advanced.

Meanwhile we study Mr. Greenwood’s attempts to destroy or weaken the testimony of contemporary literary allusions, in prose or verse, to the plays as the work of the actor.  Mr. Greenwood rests on an argument which perhaps could only have occurred to legal minds, originally, perhaps to the mind of Judge Webb, not in the prime vigour of his faculties.  Not very many literary allusions remain, made during Will’s life-time, to the plays of Shakespeare.  The writers, usually, speak of “Shakespeare,” or “W.  Shakespeare,” or “Will Shakespeare,” and leave it there.  In the same way, when they speak of other contemporaries, they name them,—­and leave it there, without telling us “who” (Frank) Beaumont, or (Kit) Marlowe, or (Robin) Greene, or (Jack) Fletcher, or any of the others “were.”  All interested readers knew who they were:  and also knew who “Shakespeare” or “Will Shakespeare” was.  No other Will Shak(&c.) was prominently before the literary and dramatic world, in 1592-1616, except the Warwickshire provincial who played with Burbage.